Re: ERT Action Item: Use Case Scenarios for EARL

I read with interest the list of use cases that Johannes produced.

However, as I said during Shadi's presentation at CSUN, in my opinion 
EARL lacks a compelling business case, one that would lead vendors of 
evaluation tools to include EARL processing (import and/or export) into 
their tools.

A possible way to increase market pressure on EARL could be the 
adoption, by WAI, of a new "accessibility conformity logo" to be put, by 
web developers, into the pages they produce to claim a certain level of 
accessibility (eg. wcag1.0 AA). Like the one that is usually linked to 
http://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG1A-Conformance.html.en .

WAI should require that whoever posts the new logo, links it to a 
RSS-like feeder that yields an EARL report that justifies the claimed 
level of accessibility. [1]

Perhaps in this way we could achieve 2 benefits:
1) increase market demand for earl reports
2) reduce the number of over-estimations of the conformance claims and 
logos.

Howevere there are a number of hurdles to overcome, such as:
- how to promote the use of the new logo and policy rather than the 
currently used one
- how to determine what are the minimum properties (formal requirements) 
that EARL reports should have in order to be used as justification for 
accessibility claims
- how to deal with availability of multiple earl reports for the same 
site/page
- how to deal with accessibility assessments that were performed without 
usage of any tool

[1] (Thank you, Wendy, for suggesting the RSS feeder.)

Best regards,

         Giorgio Brajnik
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Dip. di Matematica e Informatica   | voice: +39 (0432) 55.8445
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Received on Wednesday, 30 March 2005 14:36:21 UTC